Scott Galloway Reveals How He Went From Professor To Leader

How did a professor of marketing at a business school become the sort of like, champion for the state of modern men in our culture? Because I've noticed that you've just sort of been everywhere and sort of championing some of these things. I'm curious about why that's happened, or at least why you sort of picked up the torch to speak about some of these things.

I think you're being generous. And I would point people to people who really are experts on the topic, like Richard Reeves from the Carnegie.

I'm sorry, he's at Brookings. Excuse me. He just wrote a book called Boys and Men. Yeah, and Boys and. I just think it's. He just lays it out. He's kind of like, I. Everything I was feeling and seeing, he kind of summarized in a wonderful book. And it's. I think of myself, who loves data, marinates in data. And I'm drawn to.

Unconventional thinking like the data says something that is entirely different than the narrative and the discussion. What's really interesting, the discussion around failing young men has flipped in two years. And that is in two years ago, if you were in any way advocating for men, it was seen as a zero sum game, and that meant you were anti women. If you were talking about struggling young men and we need to be focused on helping young men, that was seen as misogynist. Just from the get go, it was like, boss, you've had a 400 year head start. How come your hair is on fire now when women have been, you know, essentially abused and had real disadvantages over the last several thousand years? And so the conversation that we're having now, even some feminists are recognizing, you know, who wants more emotionally and economically viable men. Women. And there's something going on here. And I think the data reveals the following. And that is, no cohort in America has fallen further, faster in the last 40 years than young men. It used to be 40, 60 women to men in college. Now it's slipped at 60, 40. And it's even worse than that because men drop out at greater rates over the next five years, there's going to be two women who graduate from college for every one man. You think, well, okay, fine, women are finally getting their due. And you could say, well, when it was disproportionate towards women, we were there for women. We had affirmative action for women. We had affirmative action for people of color. And by the way, that was the right thing to do. But now that it's flipped, you can walk through NYU and everywhere there are flyers. Women in Consulting angels, banking, all these female support groups, go girl. It's just everywhere. There's nothing for young men. And if you think about some of the knock on effects, the unintended consequences.

There'S I'm a progressive, but there's a general feeling in progressive politics that you don't want to acknowledge the difference between men and women. Because if you were to acknowledge a difference in the genders, you're somehow again discriminating against people who are non binary or transgender. And that's not true at all. But there is, and studies show this there is a difference from a very young age between people born as males and people born as females. Our prefrontal cortex doesn't mature as early. So an 18 year old, two 18 year olds applying to college, the woman is effectively competing against a 16 year old woman when she competes against an 18 year old man. The executive function, the on off, gas and brake is just not much more immature for men. And you've seen the stats. 4 times more likely to kill themselves, 3 times more likely to be addicted, 12 times more likely to be incarcerated women, more single women now own homes than men, which I think reflects a lot of progress. But the unintended consequence here, and there's all sorts of knock on offense, is that one, women, and we don't like to say this, are typically drawn to men who are, what I say, taller than them. So physically taller. 50% of women say they're not attracted or wouldn't date someone shorter than them. It's probably more like 80% because I think in a survey women probably don't acknowledge it or take that number down because it sounds weird to say I wouldn't be interested in a man shorter than me. But also women mate socioeconomically, horizontally and up, men horizontally and down. And 3/4 of women say economic viability is very important in selection of a mate. It's only one in four for men. And here's the issue. Every year women are getting taller and men are getting shorter. And so there's just fewer and fewer men who are viewed as economically viable, emotionally viable as mates. And so we're seeing mating rates going down. We're seeing what I call mating inequality. And that is technology tends to consolidate a market. Amazon consolidated retail, social media, consolidated social, Google consolidated search or information gathering dating apps consolidate mating in the sense that women have a much finer filter and because they have access to millions of people online, they can implement those filters. And 80% of the women are interested in the same 10% of men. So if You're a reasonable looking guy, that's not even number one. But you went to MIT and you're working at Google and your Rolex accidentally slips in your profile picture, you're going to get a massive number of swipe rides. If you're kind of 50 to 90th percentile, you do okay. The bottom half of men are literally shut out of the market. I mean shut out zero swipes. And it creates this downward spiral of confirmation that the market specifically women aren't interested in them. And the problem is now that you have more than 50% of young people and like 2/3 of men living at home, they become that low self esteem. And where it gets really ugly is they start blaming others, specifically they start blaming women, they become more prone to misogynistic content, they become more prone to nationalistic content blaming other people, whether it's immigrants for taking the jobs or women, whatever it might be. And they start buying into this notion that somehow it's women's fault and they need to take on this aggressive complexion around society and women. And I think that's really, really ugly. And the thing I hate about some of these quote unquote, you know, pro, you know, I don't call it advocates for quote unquote, you know, I use air quotes advocates for men on TikTok is the first. 80% is great, take responsibility for your life, get really strong physically, have a propensity towards action. And then it comes off the rails. They start talking about women as property and putting her in her place and, and this crazy metrics around what it means to be a man is some sort of dominance or power over women. And it's just like Jesus, how did this get so ugly so fast? And so I think whenever you start talking about an advocacy for men correctly progressives and women, their spidey sense goes off like okay, is this just repackaged violence against women? So in the last two years the conversation has become much more productive. It's like, okay, let's acknowledge the data here. Men are really struggling. The reason I got interested in it is I relate to it. I just, I was kind of going nowhere as a young man. I didn't have, you know.

It was upsetting, I was lost. So I relate to young men. I have two young boys, I can see the difference between them and their female classmates. It's like they're, my boy's 15, he's literally a dope. And the 15 year old, some of the 15 year old girls in his class, I'm like That's going to be the junior senator from Pennsylvania. I mean there the girls are just shooting and there's evidence showing that they're actually pulling away, that it's the delta is actually expanding. And so. And I have a lot of friends who have.

The narrative goes something like this. And the people who are hands down most receptive and supportive of my content, some young men like it, a lot of young men like it. Some say, you're accusing us of being incels and we don't like it. To feminists, a lot of feminists correctly say have a real problem with this and are very cautious of this content. I understand that hands down, the people are most supportive of this content is mothers. And I get emails that go something like this. Two daughters, one son, one daughter at Wharton, one daughter in PR in Chicago and my son's at home in the basement vaping and playing video games. And there's just a bunch of biological societal factors. A lot of the kind of on ramp jobs in the middle class have been outsourced in manufacturing. Men are told societally that they, you know, quite frankly should just be in their place. They try and tone down some of their masculine features around being aggressive. Colleges, the education system is biased against men. Two people brought into the principal's office for the exact same infraction on a behavior adjusted basis, the boy is twice as likely to be suspended. The behaviors and activities that colleges and schools reward, discipline, staying in your seat are just. Girls have just a much easier time with so good for them. When we leveled the educational playing field and maybe tilted it towards women, they have just blown by men. But now we need to look at, okay, if we want to have a society where people form the elemental foundations of a society and that's relationships. If we want men who are economically viable, if we want to have kids not going to population decline, what can we do to level up men just as we have attempted to level up other groups that are struggling. But the fact that we're even having this dialogue without me waiting for, I'm not exaggerating. Hundreds of tweets of hate and anger and accusations of misogyny now means the dialogue has expanded dramatically. And now I see my job as we have to come up with a different definition of masculinity than the definition that is coming from some of these quote unquote male advocates. Because there is a level of control and even like thinly veiled packaged violence and dominance and control over women that is just wrong. And I think we need a different if you will a different vision of masculinity, and I'll provide a definition and then stop talking. But I think masculinity, it's a man made construct or a person, you know, it's a societal construct. Femininity or masculinity, we can, we can have it be whatever we want it to be. But masculinity is, you know, set of behaviors that are usually associated with people born as men. But I like to think that it's acquiring the skills and strengths such that you can protect for and advocate for others. That means early on you got to work on yourself, you got to be strong, you got to get certification, you got to be mentally fit, you got to work really hard and try and establish skills such that you can get economic security, you can be emotionally and mentally strong. And the whole point, the whole shooting match is such you can protect others, you can provide for your family, you can provide for yourself. And then at some point in your life, you can start advocating for and protecting others. That is true masculinity. That's what people in the military, that's what cops do, that's what firemen do. That's what. And by the way, it's not, it's not just the domain of men. A lot of women demonstrate wonderful masculine attributes. It's getting up at six in the morning and going to work and doing shitty work such that you can protect your family economically. You know, there's a lot, it's, it's being physically strong, being mentally strong, but for God's sakes, it's never using your masculinity to in any way oppress people or to be some sort of predator for women, physically or sexually, or not have the same level of respect and admiration for women. So I think we need some traditionally, you know, masculine figures to start advocating a new form of masculine. And, and also to say that it's okay to be masculine, it's okay to want to have sex, it's okay to take risks, it's okay to be sexually aggressive. It's okay to go up to a woman who, a strange woman who you're attracted to and try and initiate a conversation. And if you don't know the difference between being aggressive and harassing someone, you got bigger problems. That's okay. That's okay. It's okay to ask someone out. Even if the, I mean, the thing that came off the rails for me was that Gillette ad and Richard Reeves talks about this a few years ago in the midst of the MeToo movement, where a Guy sees a hot woman, and he jumps up to go talk to her. And then his friend kind of gets away and says, hey, bro, that's not cool. Don't do that. It's like, that's where we are. We're not supposed to initiate contact with strange women. And I have found that a lot of women would actually appreciate respectful overtures of interest from men. And if they're not interested, you'll figure it out very fast. And guess what? You're both going to be fine. It is not a traumatizing event. And so I think there are male behaviors that we have to say to men, this is okay. This is okay. It's okay to embrace your masculinity. But we have a situation where professionally, biologically, societally, educationally, men are really struggling. And the last fact, and I promise I will stop here, is that Pew did a study that one in three men under the age of 30 haven't had sex in the last year. And people hear the word sex and their brain fires. I think of sex as a key step to an intimate relationship, and relationships are the basis of happiness in a productive society. And a huge cohort of men are not establishing the skills to have relationships, and it confirms this insecurity they have, and they just go down a rabbit hole. And by the age. By the time they're 30, they haven't developed skills. Young men need guardrails. They need a girlfriend, a friend, a boss, parents to tell them, no, you got to put on a clean shirt, you know, My first girlfriend was like, okay, if you want to get high every night, you're not gonna have sex with me. I'm not interested in a guy who has. Who smokes pot every night, right? My. My mom told me in implicit, explicit ways, you've got to get your shit together because you're, you know, you got to take care of me, you know? My friends were like, okay, boss. You need young men. I had my boss at work, and Morgan Stanley used to take me to a conference room after meeting and go, you can't say that shit. Shut the fuck up. You don't have to talk if you don't have anything productive to say. Don't say anything. I needed that. Young men need that. And so many young men are detaching from so many relationships. They have no guardrails. God, that was a rant.

No, that was great, man.